Numbers Game Revisited

My last post had me dig up my Numbers Game post. It reminded me of a recent discussion I had with my wife on my fairly libertarian views on drugs. While I may let the wookie howl, I certainly make sure to put the small-L in “libertarian”, as I may break a bit from the purist.

You see Mrs. Weer’d was surprised that when I was talking about legal heroin dealers (I like to use heroin and cocaine when talking illegal drugs because things like marijuana don’t really put much fear in the average drug-war supporter, and I see the legalization in some fashion of marijuana to be politically inevitable at this point), I mentioned that they should probably hold a license of some sort to sell the product.

Yeah, small-government me is talking about licensing drug dispensaries. Why? Well I see two problems with the illegal drug trade (besides the big one, being that they can’t rely on Police to protect their interests, so they need to self-enforce their own unwritten “laws”, often seen as inner city gang violence) is that A) The drugs are of questionable content and purity, which can result in overdoses and poisoning. (You’ll note the same thing happened during prohibition, Feds would raid a house and find everybody dead because they were consuming alcohol that had poisons in it from poor craftsmanship, or were drinking toxic stuff like Sterno) B) Drug dealers are breaking the law selling drugs to ANYBODY, so selling to minor children isn’t much different than selling to grown adults.

The Numbers Game came up when discussing selling to minors. Now if you read the above gun post you’ll note that I point out that the Numbers Game is a pointless exercise…but “minors” fall into that too. Let’s face it, You can’t buy a pack of smokes when you’re 17 years old and 364 days old…but the next day you can buy a whole carton and smoke them in the parking lot! Same goes to the common practice of a 20 year old going to a bar the day before their birthday, and start drinking as soon as the clock strikes midnight. Of course nothing changes in those hours and days or even years. Also it seems rather foolish to be able to smoke, vote, enter binding contracts, enlist in the military, buy a long-gun, work full-time, and live on one’s own at 18…but you need to wait until you’re 21 to drink a beer, or buy a handgun.

Now obviously we can debate those numbers….but that being said we can agree that say, a 13 year old SHOULD NOT be engaging in any of those adult behaviors. They’re too young, too inexperienced, too ignorant of the world, and still rapidly changing into an adult.

There’s the HUGE difference between between gun control and legal definitions of minority and majority. People will agree that there are definite times when a person is a minor, and when a person is an adult. Certainly a 5-year-old is most certainly a child, and a 40-year-old is an adult. Now the question is where to draw the line, and frankly that can be debated forever, as no two people are the same, so some bit of arbitrary notation is needed.

But what about the gun control laws. Has anybody declared a perfectly safe number of rounds to be stuffed into a gun? Of course not. Many laws have the round-number of 10, but really will the antis stay quiet if somebody shoots up a school using 9-shot single-stack pistol, or a five-shot shotgun, or a four-shot hunting rifle? Of course not!

Same goes for any other regulation we can mull over. Just look at the ban-compliant rifles during the “Assault Weapon Ban”. Companies quickly started removing the banned features from guns, often leaving a gun with just the extended pistol grip and a 10-round magazine. Did the antis agree that this new-and-improved AR-15 and AK-pattern rifles were fine for public consumption? Of course not! They called the compliance a “Loophole”. By that definition the whole law was one big loophole, as there was no way for a company to comply with the law without consulting the arbitrary opinions of an anti-gunner. Further I doubt the antis much liked guns that were naturally compliant with the law like the M1 Carbine or the Ruger Mini-14. Plus there’s the silliness that you can hang a million features off of a non-auto-loading gun, like an Enfield rifle (say a model that has a grenade launcher adapter, bayonet lug, and a removable magazine), or an Yugo SKS which is semi-auto with a FIXED magazine, but has a grenade launcher, flash hider, and bayonet lug…but that fixed magazine exempts it.

Really they’re just against all guns, but can’t take them all, so they’ll go for the divide and conquer approach!

Sorry guys, we’ll hang together, and let YOU hang individually!

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0 Responses to Numbers Game Revisited

  1. pat n mike says:

    regarding “where do you draw the line,” – I have a suggestion:

    If the social/psychological/psychiatric sciences could get their act together, and come up with an objective test that would determine “maturity” or “adult thinking”, then we would be able to dispense with the arbitrary numbers of years. (Of course, that will never happen, because the people that those disciplines attract are not the sort that will ever agree on anything.)

  2. Greg Camp says:

    I don’t mind the arbitrary numbers when applied to things like age. Everyone has to meet the same standard. It is clear that a child has no business doing the things named–at least without adult supervision, in several of the cases–so we have to have an age limit. Picking a number there and going with it prevents some bureaucrat from having discretion in our exercise of rights. Once a person reaches the age of majority, things happen automatically.

    Magazine capacity is a different matter entirely. That’s not applying a standard to human behavior. That’s deciding what kind of tools are permitted–without reference to the legitimate uses for those tools. Tell me that I have to have a license to carry a handgun, and I’ll grumble and go along with it–for now. There’s a sliver of sense in requiring a background check for legal gun carriers, and as long as the state is shall-issue and doesn’t charge silly fees, it’s staying in the reasonable zone. Tell me that this is kosher, while that one over there isn’t, when the two are basically the same gun, and now we have a problem.

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